If it were up to me, I’d give Bush and the whole vile crew a fair trial and then shoot them at sunrise. Maybe I’m engaging in a little hyperbole here, but not by much. I’m furious at the screwing that the Republicans have given this country, and seems to be getting away with still.

Obama seems to act like the Christian he professes to be. He’s willing to forgive and forget. He craves the support of the Republican right so badly he even proposed putting a bunch of their trickle-down crap in his stimulus bill. He’s trying to find a way to synthesize left and right, all for the sake of civil discourse, I suppose. Bit I’m an atheist, although not particularly a militant one. Life is tough enough that I don’t want to deny people their fairy tales if that will help them persevere. But on the most immediate political level, trickle-down economics has proven itself a disaster, and we need an economic strategy with a far more democratic impulse. An understanding of that is as important to an evangelical as it is to a crusty old urban Jewish lefty like me.

I know that Obama said he was planning to win everywhere, not just in the more progressive states on the coasts. He wants to lead a united country rather than the assemblage of disparate parts that it now seems to be becoming. He is, after all, from Chicago, the city that serves as the capital of the Midwest. So it makes perfect sense that he asked centrist and even center-right voters into his big tent, as well as the left. He once responded to criticism from the left by saying, with a real tone of sadness, that he was, at heart, “a progressive.” I think he said, “I’m a pretty progressive guy.” He seemed to be saying that at this point in history, that’s all we can probably hope for. Obama has to govern from the center, and only give deference to the left and his right.

I know that means the left will have to keep putting pressure on him, just as the left did on Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Unions were organized and social security and unemployment insurance created because of activists from the left. The Right vehemently opposed these things, and has done so ever since. I remember President Clinton used to complain he didn’t have anyone pushing him from the left, only from the right, and he wondered where the left had gone.

Perhaps that was Obama’s whole intention in creating the permanent campaign. If so, that certainly is a testimony to his skills as a community organizer. Especially when you consider he seems to have made the whole nation his community. It’s an impressive feat, but who knows if it will last.

Thank God Obama’s not posturing himself as the Great Decider, but rather the great organizer. He will, of course, have to make decisions, but he also wants to forge a synthesis with input from everywhere, all of which is incredibly commendable.

Then there’s the war. Not the Iraq War—the war now in Gaza.

“I will say plenty” about the problem when he assumes the office, he said.

I intensely care about Israel, but there are many things about it that make me ambivalent as well. I want Israel to survive as a place where Jews can always seek refuge. I think Jews, like every other nationality, are entitled to a Homeland. But I also am uncomfortable with the idea of a Jewish theological state. The Middle East does not need another fundamentalist state run by rabbis, Mullahs, preachers, ministers, or any of that lot. I am tormented and attracted by the logic of a heresy in regards to Israel. Perhaps the answer after all is not a two-state solution but a one-state solution involving Jews and Arabs and Armenians and Filipinos and all the other people who live there now. Israel would be best off as a thriving modern secular democracy. Israel will never stop being a center of Jewish culture and history because it just is that. Jerusalem will forever be not only one of the world’s oldest cities, but the eternal home of Jews. But it also is home to other people as well, just as, frankly, not all the denizens of Salt Lake City are Mormons. The fact is Israelis are already one of the least religious people on earth. A nation born of a people who survived the Holocaust should logically never believe there is a God who cares about them. Besides, the secret nobody talks about is that many Jews and Arabs already live in relative harmony in Israel. A good percentage of the population is Arab, and many of those are even Moslem. On a daily basis, many Arabs and Jews live side by side without problem.

For a decade I edited the B’nai Brith Messenger, once the city’s second oldest newspaper. I know the Jewish community. When the Orthodox rabbi who owned the paper said he wanted to hire me, I replied, “Yale, but I’m a socialist and atheist.” He still wanted me as his editor—perhaps because I was a direct descendant of the Schneersohn family, the father-to-son dynasty of the Lubavitch movement. He told me I could publish what I wanted. I took him up on that. In between the other articles about kosher food and the like I ran articles sympathetic to the “Peace Now” and even further left movements. I am very aware of my Jewishness as a cultural, political and historical reality. But the vitality that only a democratic, secular and scientific society can generate for itself will always be better than the stultifying tribalism of a nation run by rabbis.

I am worried by the way that American Jewish communal organizations have developed a suffocating orthodoxy and an authoritarian hierarchical culture. Once upon a time, Jewish organizations were highly and even eccentrically disorganized organisms that would come together only when it was absolutely necessary. But the way they are now organized strikes me as most un-Jewish. Ironically, Israelis do not put up with such for themselves.

That Obama is a professed Christian who makes a point of saying that non-religious people also are a part of a diverse nation hints at the solution. America is one of the most religious countries in the world short of Saudi Arabia.

Even so, the men who wrote the constitution were deists. They saw the need to separate church and state because they had suffered confrontations with the ultra-religious of their times, who like all ultra-religious want to impose their way of lives on everyone. Somewhere, American has veered away from the path set by its own Revolution.

How does this relate to America’s economic travails? Here too, I think we have to eliminate the authoritarian hierarchical values that monopoly capitalism has imposed on the rest of us. We need more economic democracy. We need a kind of social democracy, a mixture of socialism and capitalism with an overarching commitment to democracy.

Be a Magic Christian, Mr. Obama. Encourage the best of us. Emulate the way that Roosevelt’s support for theater and music and writers invigorated the nation’s culture. Culture boomed in the Great Depression, and many of our greatest writers, artists, musicians and actors came out of it. Understand, the economic collapse this nation now suffers from was preceded by a cultural collapse, because our culture became the sole property of only the most commercial impulses, and it began imploding long before the economic malaise we now suffer.

In the movie, “The Magic Christian,” you might remember how people dove into a cesspool after the dirty dollars that were thrown there. People were willing to cover themselves in excrement just for the sake of the almighty dollar.

Now that the dollar is not so almighty anymore, perhaps there’s a better way to be a Magic Christian. Instead of throwing our money into cesspools like imperialist wars and corporate socialism, we can begin investing in our very own humanity.

Lionel Rolfe is the author of seven books, including “Literary L.A.” and “The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather.”